Peter Whittle is founder and director of The New Culture Forum, a think tank that challenges the Left-liberal stranglehold on culture and the arts.

The death of respect in modern Britain

Tonight on BBC Two you can see the first half of a two-part documentary which explores the extent to which Britain is indeed broken. Called The Death of Respect, it's been made by the highly respected BBC journalist John Ware. It was apparently considered too "sensitive" to go out before May's election, and has now found a suspiciously late-night resting place – 11.20pm. Perhaps many of its observations and conclusions are just too rich for BBC blood.

Ware pretty much covers the waterfront of social ills. "I have a daughter aged 10 at primary school," he wrote recently. "One of her classmates regularly humiliates an overweight teacher, calling her, 'you blob' or 'flubber' in front of the entire class. He also hits his teachers. There is a regime in place to try to 'manage his anger' but it is not working.

"Some boys in my daughter's class swear at people to insult them, and this is not a primary school which teaches children are drawn from the ranks of the poor and dispossessed. I was travelling home late at night on the London tube when two girls and two boys in their late teens got on and started talking about the merits of masturbation. They were loud and boorish, but not drunk, and they were completely oblivious to the impact on their fellow passengers."

This sort of thing will be so familiar to many – perhaps even most – of us by now. What we will also be familiar with is the level of denial about the sheer extent of social decomposition which has taken place. We are told that every age has it's "moral panic" and that, hey, things are really not so bad, mustn't hark back to some mythical golden age, blah blah.

We know that this is rubbish. The past 50 years or so have seen an attack on, and then a catastrophic collapse in, any form of authority – legal, cultural, moral, social, familial. But it would take real courage on the part of the liberal elites to admit that they might have been wrong, even about some things. Instead, they have to keep pretending that everything is just fine, and that those who are frightened, or complain, or who are simply bewildered by what has happened around them, are nothing more than misinformed reactionaries.

The signs are however that they won't be able to keep this up indefinitely. For a start, the growth in anxiety about what is happening to us is spreading across all age groups. And, when it comes to the posturing of the bully, the anti-social and the yob, those from quite different political traditions are now sensing that society is spirally out of control.

Over the past couple of years, conversation after conversation has convinced me that Disgusted no longer resides just in Tunbridge Wells, but around the dinner tables of Islington, Highbury and even Hampstead. Perhaps the results of what were, for the bien pensants, nice ideas on paper, are finally confronting them via a brick through the sash window.